Brainstorm: Better Planning, Collaboration, & Reporting for Core Contributor Work

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

@ali_hugo Thanks for the good work on this! A survey is a good base for doing an iteration of improvement. I have done a pass of review, I’m putting my comments below:

• Can we ask the question 4 - “How long should core sprints be?” to everyone, regardless of what they choose on other questions? We can filter the results in the spreadsheet as needed, but it would be useful to know what everyone thinks, since it’s still going to have an impact, if anything on the rhythm of communication.

• Before asking the question 3 - “Should we continue doing sprints?”, can we qualify the uses the respondant would have for them? We could get more granularity in what would be useful for people - either existing now, or to implement. I.e. add questions before like:

  • “Do you think Open edx would benefit from more planning of the work being contributed?”
  • “Would the project benefit from more/better retrospective about the contributed work?”
  • “Would it be useful to you to get more visibility from the community into your work?”
  • “Would you benefit from knowing more about other contributors’ work?”

• For question 7 about the use of the sprint retro & planning questionnaire, I would rather ask the respondent if they find the questionnaire useful to collect checkins. We’ll all know more once we have the results of the questionnaire, so we should be taking better decisions then.

• For question 8 about the timing of the notification to complete the questionnaire, I agree that we should make it clear when the end of the sprint actually is. I believe it’s Monday evening though?

  • In any case, we should show it clearly on the form - a good way to do that would be to write the name of the weekday on each of the form answers presented (eg. “c) Last day of sprint (Monday)”).
  • It would also be useful to make it clear what the response deadline is - which should be the evening of the last day of the sprint

• For question 10 about the report, it’s useful to have the open response field, but it would be useful to also get the yes/no answer we have for the other elements too. It is useful to force a choice, though with giving the open text field to give nuances.

  • Actually, other sections of the form would also benefit from getting open forms (optional ones).
  • In the open form fields, also maybe ask which improvements people would like?

@gabrieldamours @ali_hugo

@ali_hugo

When planning your work, do you follow the Core Contributor sprint schedule?
Sprints start on Saturdays and run for 2 weeks

@gabrieldamours Would that make the question clearer to you? (P.s. I hope the schedule I’ve described there is correct! @Fox_Piacenti @Cassie Could one of you confirm, please?)

I believe the sprints finish on Monday evenings, no? In any case, it’s true that we have caught a gap in documentation - could we add to the tasks list on this project to properly document the sprints, including decisions and changes coming from the survey?

FYI, there are some elements described on the wiki about the sprints and their reports, for example at https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/3507748865/Core+Contributors+How+to+Help+the+Project - but currently the new core contributors are mostly exposed to the process through the email notifications (cf onboarding runbooks). Having better documentation and onboarding of new core contributors could likely help a lot here.

We actually have a brand new set of core contributors who have just passed their reviews btw - it could be worth looking into their onboarding & feedback, in particular?